It is common in the telephone industry, where cable splices need to be made along the path of distribution, that splices be made which will include some type of an electrical connection to splice the individual wires of the cable and environmentally seal them in a connection enclosure to prevent degradation to the connection. This type of splice could be either a so-called drop wire splice or could be a buried splice in the case of underground cable. It is also common to have both two or six pairs of twisted wire which comprise the telephone cable.
As in almost any electrical connection device, where a cable is involved, and where an individual wire or a plurality of wires are interconnected to terminals or like wires, a so-called strain relief mechanism is desirable, such that tension or force outwardly on the cable is not transmitted to the electrical connection of the wires, but rather the force as transmitted to a housing into which the cable is being terminated. Various strain relief mechanisms exist in the marketplace and in the prior art for transferring the forces to the connector housings.
One such device is shown in the Tyco Electronics (AMP Division) commercial product known as the CERTI-SEAL wire splice enclosure where the housing is formed as a shell of two similar halves, where one of the halves includes upstanding posts. The cables to be spliced are brought in from opposite ends and the cables are laced around the posts in a meandering fashion. The individual wires are then interconnected to one another by splice connection blocks known as TEL-SPLICE (also a commercial of Tyco Electronics) for making the individual wire splices.
While the above-mentioned connection assembly is adequate for its intended use, it would be, however, advantageous to provide such a splice enclosure which could either be used for a buried drop wire splice, or a so-called aerial drop wire splice interchangeably. In addition to being interchangeable between the specific application, it would also be advantageous to have a splice enclosure which can accommodate more than one cable size, in order that the enclosure can accommodate at least the two most common splice cable sizes, that is, the two pair and six pair as discussed above.